---
title: "Testing Guide for 4.9-RELEASE"
sidenav: download
---

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<h3>Goals</h3>

<p>As part of our on-going effort to improve the release engineering
  process, we have identified several areas that need significant
  quality assurance testing during the release candidate phase.
  Below, we've listed the changes in 4.9-RELEASE that we feel merit
  the most attention due to their involving substantial changes to the
  system, or having arrived late in the development cycle leading up
  to the release.  In general, our goal in the QA process is to
  attempt to check a number of things:</p>

<ul>
  <li>The system has not regressed with respects to stability, correctness,
    interoperability, or performance of features present in prior
    releases.<br clear="none" /><br clear="none" /></li>

  <li>New features result in the desired improvement in stability,
    correctness, interoperability, or performance.</li>
</ul>

<p>To effectively determine this, it's desirable to test the system in
  a diverse set of environments, applying a wide set of workloads,
  forcing the system to operate both within and outside its normal
  specification.  Particular focus should often be placed on the
  continuing (or new) capability of the system to perform correctly
  when used in concert with systems from other vendors.</p>

<h3>Features to explore carefully:</h3>

<ul>
  <li><p>A bug affecting IPFW2 "limit" rules was fixed very late in
    the release cycle; other ipfw2 features should not be affected.
    We are interested in hearing any feedback about IFPW2 in
    4.9-RC3.</p></li>

  <li><p>The sysinstall(8) utility was updated to support multiple
    mail transfer agents (MTAs).  As such, the familiar Network
    Services menu was modified to expose a new option entitled
    Mail.</p></li>

  <li><p>The <tt>xl</tt> driver has recently been updated with full
    busdma support among other improvements.  This driver will now
    work with large memory systems with PAE enabled.</p></li>

  <li><p>Users with large memory configurations (&gt;4G) should explore
    the recently added <b>PAE</b> support in 4.9-RELEASE.</p></li>
</ul>

<p>The <a href="../relnotes/" shape="rect">release notes</a> will always be
  a good place to look for things to test.</p>

<h3>Known Issues</h3>
<ul>
  <li>The kernel hangs solidly during device configuration when
   certain SATA controllers are installed on the system.
(<a href="http://people.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/patches/sata.patch" shape="rect">patch</a>)</li>

  <li>4.9-PRE panics reproducibly on a heavily loaded ata(4)-system.
   <a href="http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/57174" shape="rect">PR</a></li>
</ul>

</div>
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